Pathfinders of the West eBook

the brothers again headed westward. The Crows
guided them to the Horse Indians, who in turn took
the French to their next western neighbors, the Bows.
The Bows were preparing to war on the Snakes, a mountain
tribe to the west. Tepees dotted the valley.
Women were pounding the buffalo meat into pemmican
for the raiders. The young braves spent the night
with war-song and war-dance, to work themselves into
a frenzy of bravado. The Bows were to march west;
so the French joined the warriors, gradually turning
northwest toward what is now Helena.

It was winter. The hills were powdered with
snow that obliterated all traces of the fleeing Snakes.
The way became more mountainous and dangerous.
Iced sloughs gave place to swift torrents and cataracts.
On New Year’s day, 1743, there rose through the
gray haze to the fore the ragged sky-line of the Bighorn
Mountains. Women and children were now left
in a sheltered valley, the warriors advancing unimpeded.
Francois de la Verendrye remained at the camp to guard
the baggage. Pierre went on with the raiders.
In two weeks they were at the foot of the main range
of the northern Rockies. Against the sky the
snowy heights rose—­an impassable barrier
between the plains and the Western Sea. What
lay beyond—­the Beyond that had been luring
them on and on, from river to river and land to land,
for more than ten years? Surely on the other
side of those lofty summits one might look down on
the long-sought Western Sea. Never suspecting
that another thousand miles of wilderness and mountain
fastness lay between him and his quest, young De la
Verendrye wanted to cross the Great Divide. Destiny
decreed otherwise. The raid of the Bows against
the Snakes ended in a fiasco. No Snakes were
to be found at their usual winter hunt. Had
they decamped to massacre the Bow women and children
left in the valley to the rear? The Bows fled
back to their wives in a panic; so De la Verendrye
could not climb the mountains that barred the way to
the sea. The retreat was made in the teeth of
a howling mountain blizzard, and the warriors reached
the rendezvous more dead than alive. No Snake
Indians were seen at all. The Bows marched homeward
along the valley of the Upper Missouri through the
country of the Sioux, with whom they were allied.
On the banks of the river the brothers buried a leaden
plate with the royal arms of France imprinted.
At the end of July, 1743, they were once more back
on the Assiniboine River. For thirteen years
they had followed a hopeless quest. Instead of
a Western Sea, they had found a sea of prairie, a
sea of mountains, and two great rivers, the Saskatchewan
and the Missouri.